The land and its outbuildings are coughing up more treasures as we tear down walls, remove layers of flooring, and dig out the crawl space under the house.
Housed between the two sides of the rotting dry wall of a shed behind the house, there were dozens of printing mats, short for matrix. These are heavy cardboard sheets steamed over typeset newspaper pages so the words and images are made in impression. The cardboard is rolled and covered with lead to produce lead drums that fill in the impressions. The drums are inked and used in rotary printing of pages of the newspaper.
One of the pages has a date of June 1956.
And then the walls gave us critters. One whole skeleton and somewhat mummified squirrel and two more skulls and a spine and ribs.
But the land gives us more. Meet the O'Lanterns. Pumpkins for carving and smaller sugar pie pumpkins for eating. Seeds and string removed for baking tonight, baked with brown sugar, butter, nutmeg, ginger, and clove. Seeds are drying for snacking later.
Little friends visit and the pecans fall.
And just before sunset, one last treasure of the day is discovered between lost pages of time on the land.
Just in time for a creepy Halloween.
It was an unusual winter, spring, and summer with tornadoes in February and torrential flooding rains for 5 months. Only in August did we see clear skies - a time when we are usually begging for rain after the summer drought. The grass and fields tend to be brown and withering, but only now is the grass starting to yellow.
The heat seemed to be drained from summer by the end of the first week of August. It was cool and delicious weather; the kind of respite we look forward to in September.
But September is here and still cool and lovely. The trees are already turning and shedding their leaves. The acorns are budding and growing.
These young acorns fell from the bur-oak tree in our front yard. The bur-oak is the only tree native to the old prairie. All other oaks, maples, cottonwoods, etc. are considered weeds and were introduced as pioneers settled the area.
Will we get an Indian summer? I don't know and I hope not. I'm not one for heat. Give me jacket weather any day.
Another sign that the holiday season is coming are the spiders. Their webs surround the house - not in a totally creepy way - but still, I am constantly running into them or almost. My husband is more of an arachnophobe than I am; the shocked screams have not all been mine.
And who are they eating? We've seen crickets, flies, and moths caught in their webs. But I wonder if the cicadas are too big for them? Here's a cicada skin cracked open and left on one of the porch columns. It's been there for weeks.
I, Queen of my 3/4 acres, proclaim that autumn is here! And it's getting nice and spooky around here!
